Monday, February 11, 2013

Unions make us strong

When unions are strong, they bargain for higher wages, more benefits and better working conditions. At the same time, they provide the bench-mark for non-union employers to increase wages and benefits to attract qualified workers and prevent unions from coming in. Also, unions work for welfare benefit legislation (unemployment benefits, minimum wage, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security etc.) We're living through a crash created by and for financial elites, and the elites are coming out of it unscathed. Instead of Wall Street paying for the damage it has done, the rest of us are now being asked to pay with cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and many other programs that benefit workers. Inequality did not fall from the sky. It's not an act of god. It's the result of deliberate policies made by and for the capitalist class.

The decline of the unions are explained by a myriad of reasons by the experts; not democratic enough; they don't know how to organize the community; they're victims of globalization; they are too bureaucratic; they don't work hard enough in politics; they don't embrace young people and minorities...and so on. While many of these problems are perhaps true real the fundamental cause is that the unions (and the rest of us) are on the losing side of the gigantic class war. The assault on unions has been deliberate and merciless. Step by step, labor laws have been weakened so that organizing new members has become nearly impossible. State governments are attacking public employee unions and further weakening labor protections. We see laws proposed that would weaken the ability of unions to engage in action. Nearly every union is fighting to prevent state governments from destroying public-sector unions and creating right-to-work-for-less states. Employees get fired for organizing activities in violation of labor law but the employers are rarely charged by the National Labor Relations Board. Obama and the Democrats could have passed the Employee Free Choice Act which would greatly facilitate union organizing when the Democrats controlled the Congress from 2008 to 2010. It didn't even come up for a vote. Yet unions continue to throw themselves, heart and soul, into electing Democrats.

We always talk about building a movement, rebuilding class power, fighting for economic justice, working with and on behalf of the poor and the unemployed, uniting with environmentalists, linking with workers in developing nations like China, Brazil and India and on and on. While all of these actions are important, Occupy Wall Street proved that the American people were, at the very least, sympathetic to a movement that targets the ruling class, a similar movement needs to be ignited by unions. But it will take more than just the unions to do that.

Based on this

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